Sunday, 2 September 2012

Organic Evolution TimeLine and Keywords

The current Organic Evolution TimeLine has now (finally!) been given a once over to standardise Keywords and remove a few minor typos and errors. (Please report any remaining ones you spot.) The descriptions remain quite short (and URLs are plain text rather than hyperlinked) for now due to technical reasons but hopefully will be expanded in the reasonable near future.

Along with the other TimePoints currently in the system, these can now be found on the Extended MapTime Glossary page. (The MapTime Glossay does not have TimePoints or Keywords in it.) The TimePoints and Keywords are also summarised below. (Note that on the MapTime website, it is now possible to sort these TimePoints by date, name or edit date.)

Biblical Creation Myth.
(TimePoint) 6000 BC. Consensus age of the Earth from calculations based on the Old Testament Creation myth. This TimePoint featured in the original MapTime paper but has been taken out of the default TimeLine as it stood out as the only non-factual event. We might add an "Age of the Earth" TimeLine, which shows how (much) our understanding has changed over time. Source: AnswersInGenesis.

Cold War Ends.
(TimePoint) 1989 AD, 2 December. Bush and Gorbachev announce the end of the Cold War at the Malta summit. The Soviet Union dissolves two years later. Source: Wikipedia. (Keywords: history).

Hiroshima.
(TimePoint) 1945 AD, 6 August. The first use of an atomic weapon. A 13-18 kt atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during the latter stages of WWII. Source: Wikipedia. (Keywords: history, technology).

TimeLine.
A TimeLine is a collection of TimePoints, usually grouped by a particular theme. The Default TimeLine is Organic Evolution TimeLine based on the MapTime paper.

TimePoint.
A TimePoint is an event on a TimeLine that will be mapped onto the appropriate place along the TimeRoute. The youngest TimePoint is first placed at the destination of the route, the youngest is placed at the starting point and then the remaining points are spaced out according to scale along the route plotted by Google Maps.

TimeRoute.
Once a TimeLine has been plotted on Google Maps, it is known as a TimeRoute.